


How To Do Nothing

by afterawhile



Series: she just wants to talk through the daytime [3]
Category: BLACKPINK (Band), EXO (Band), K-pop
Genre: Angst, Break Up, F/M, Fluff, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 04:33:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30083517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterawhile/pseuds/afterawhile
Summary: She taught him how to do nothing.And now she’s gone.
Relationships: Park Chaeyoung | Rosé/Park Chanyeol
Series: she just wants to talk through the daytime [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2213388
Kudos: 3





	How To Do Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the song How To Do Nothing by Lido

Wait." 

Her giggle. He wanted to hear it every minute of every second. 

He smiled, settling behind her sat body and crossed legs. His arms secured around her, resting his head on her shoulder. She always smelled like lavender and vanilla, sometimes mixed with his own scent. 

"I'm waiting." He husked below her ear where his mouth was settled. The breath must have tickled her skin because she curled her neck as he settled against her. But her eyes were locked on the window across from the bed in front of them. 

"Do you hear it?" She whispered. 

A low rumble, barely audible had began to vibrate their surroundings. They were still enough that he could feel the the bed move beneath them just slightly. 

"Now, listen and watch." He could hear the little grin on her lips.

The clacks of the train were faint as first. Almost sounding like a galloping horse before the sound amplified. You would have thought that the metro train was just feet from her bedroom window, but it was across the street of her apartment building. Standing tall and at eye level with them, her small frame crafted into his. 

"Rosie," A smile twitched on the corners. "I've heard the subway before."

"Shh," She hushed, placing a finger delicately to her own lips. "Listen." 

It was loud, obnoxious to some and to him when it ruined their slumber while they slept in her bed. But it began to morph, rhythmic with his low heartbeat almost exactly. It sounded like a mantra, clearing his mind once he had actually listened like she asked. Maybe it was how warm the skin of her back felt against his bare chest. And that delicious scent. Maybe it was how the early morning glow was reflecting off of the trains windows, saturating the room and mesmerizing them into the most calming state. 

His eyes trailed away from the train to see her fixated on it, lost in the movement of the train, only blinking couple seconds. Her eyelashes long and soft, her tiny freckle just below. 

"Nothing is better than this." 

Suddenly, all he ever wanted to do was sit and watch trains go by her bedroom window. As long as it was with her, nothing was all he needed. 

————————

He used to not understand how people spent so long being broken about ended relationships. 

Chanyeol had watched his friends go through countless amounts of them. Like the time he helped Lisa, a friend he had met in a study group, home from the bar, drunk and so broken over her ended relationship with Mark, a boy she had met in Central Park. They hadn't dated long, so he didn't get it. Chanyeol couldn't wrap his head around allowing someone to hurt you so bad it made it hard to even get out of bed the next day. 

But now he understood. And fuck, he wished he didn't.

He had been thrown from the free fall of falling in love. Not falling in love with her was impossible, Chanyeol knew that the moment she walked out of that elevator.

Being a freelance guitar teacher to put him through college was a dream job to him. It paid the bills, he got to teach a skill he had mastered to others all with the flexibility of the schedule. Chanyeol taught them in their homes usually, mostly kids and teenagers. Sometimes the rare older man in his 50s ready for something new. He had only three student he taught weekly, but he had picked up a fourth now that spring semester had ended. With finals over, he could save some money for the next school year. His final one before he had that Masters Degree in his hand and he was free from the confines of papers and lectures. 

His new student lived in Brooklyn, a little bit of commute for him since he lived closer to NYU's campus. Though he hadn't minded. It gave him time to play around on his guitar before it would be used for work only for the next two hours. The train stop was right next to the apartment building, honestly making it easier for him than it would be in the heart of the city. 

With a buzz, the student's mother allowed Chanyeol in. He readjusted his guitar case to a more comfortable spot on his shoulder as he pressed the elevator button, the up arrow distorted from the crack in the plastic. The building was a little run down, but that was the Brooklyn charm. 

No matter how hard he tried, forgetting the first time he saw her would never be erased. 

The elevators door opened, like it was revealing Gods best creation. 

Long brown hair that looked almost too silky to touch, like his rough and callused hands would taint it. The young woman was only wearing a pair of gray sweat pants and a white, long sleeved shirt but never had he seen such simple fabric compliment a body so well before. Her bare face screamed innocence, but her plump lips sung the opposite to him. Soft auburn eyes that seemed to get more complicated the longer he held the contact stared back at him, a faint blush spreading across her skin of her round cheeks. Her aura caught him, seeped into him as the captivating girl smiled shyly.

"Hi." He remembered how breathless his voice sounded. Normally he wasn't the type to be caught so off guard but a stranger had done it effortlessly. 

Her smile turned into the cutest grin, like she herself was trying to control her emotions. The beautiful stranger bit her lip, "Hello." 

They slowly switched spots, him now in the elevator, tightening his grip on the strap of his case while he watched her fidget with her phone. She turned, her hair now hiding her face too soon for his liking and walked towards the front door of the building to leave. Chanyeol had been to distracted to remember to press a floor button, the elevator ding scolded him. 

She glanced back just as the elevator doors inched shut. It was all he could think about during the guitar lesson, and the entirety of his week. 

Their meeting had been too short for him to put his thought in order enough to ask for her number, or even just her name. Chanyeol tried to reschedule the lesson with this particular student for an earlier time in the week in hopes of running into her again, but they weren't able to. When the day came, he thought about showing up early. His conscious quickly marked that idea as a no for being too creepy. The unknown beauty might not even live in the building at all. 

However, that didn't change the exciting apprehension he felt at the possibility of seeing her again as his feet took him up the steps of the tan brick building. Chanyeol bit at the inside of his cheek, feeling quite lame about the thoughts going in his head. It's just that he had never experienced anything remotely close to their brief exchange. The word hello had never sounded so sweet to him. Whatever it was, Chanyeol felt like maybe it was meant to be experienced. 

She was meant to be experienced. 

And fate must have felt the same, placing her on the other side of those doors when they opened. 

Her name was Rosie.

She was an artist. Her extremely small apartment scattered with paint brushes, sketches and sketchbooks. Canvases lined her walls, all of her work. Chanyeol remembered seeing them all when he picked up from her apartment for the first date, a movie in Central Park. He had known her for less than any amount of time to really understand someone but the paintings said it all for her. 

They progressed like a hurricane, fast and strong. From their first kiss to the first time his ears heard the moan of his name play into the bed sheets, her sweet voice being the instrument. They were powerful, she was powerful. Taking Chanyeol to a cloud higher than 9.

Learning who she was his favorite ride. was stunning, inside and out. Emotional and passionate about everything. She was a rose in the middle of the dirty streets of New York City. But not without the thorns that stabbed when she had to. She saw the world differently than him. Chanyeol had only seen it in the three primary colors, in its simplicity. When she saw the whole spectrum possible.

Rosie did not care from time, always stoping to listen to the live music in the subway stations or how drinking away the art in the foam in her latte was always a mental struggle for her. Her skin was decorated in the most random, yet beautiful tattoos. They were spaced, with no correlation but yet it worked. There were some as odd as a band-aid on her knee, she said it was because she always found her self getting random bruises on her legs. She was slightly clumsy, but Chanyeol would call it carefree. His favorite one was the outlined rose on the slope of her shoulder, kissing it every chance he could. Sometimes he swore that part of her skin tasted sweeter. 

He fell in love with this woman at such an incredible rate, that his own heart hurt and ached in his chest. Physically. Every time she smiled at him, just for him. Every time she pulled him to the bed with that hunger in her eyes. Every time she stopped to pet a dog on the street. She was unlike anything he had ever met.

They sometime spent days locked on either ones apartment, sometimes for 48 hours straight, just being. Being bathed in each other kisses and each others laughter. He got to see her in the most peaceful ways, the most sensual ways, and even the most manic ways. His lips would be attached to her neck, nibbling at her earlobe when she was freeze and jump his lap, practically sprinting to her makeshift painting studio in the corner and never moving again until her masterpiece was done. He could tell what was going on in that disastrously gorgeous mind of hers by what she painted or sketch. A lot of her work was of hands, lips, close ups of other parts of the body. It took him a while to realize that it was his hands, his lips. Her mind was filled with him. 

Painting wasn't her only obsession. It seemed that art itself was. Rosie owned a Polaroid camera that she carried with her where ever they went. The mechanical shutter was just another sound to him, he was use to it. It didn't matter where they were, in the theater mid movie, a late night walk to the Chinese take out restaurant, in bed. One night while he lazily played around on his guitar in bed, she straddled him and took so many pictures he has lost count. Soon, her wall filled with the little shots of memories. Pictures of him lined thought out like veins. 

It was bliss until it wasn't. 

Chanyeol knew life hadn't been fair to Rosie's in the past. She came from a wealthy family that didn't understand her, at least that what she had told him. They hadn't supported her in years, not since she had left them the second she turned 18. It was odd for him to hear, as he had a great relationship with his family. But then she told him. One night after too much gin, she cried in front of him for the first time and told him about her demons, how she felt trapped in that large mansion for most of her life. That she never felt enough for them no matter how much she tried, which was why she hadn't seen them since she left. 

"Not feeling like enough, like your existence doesn't matter, is the worst feeling any human could feel."

He had seen the sadness in her eyes since the beginning, it had been part of why he felt so drawn to her. A girl this beautiful with eyes as sad as hers had things to say, and things to teach. 

It was hard to hear her lie to him when asked if she was okay on the bad days. He knew she had thought she mastered that fake bright smile, but in reality, he could see right through it. Rosie wasn't okay, and it broke his heart every time he found her wide away in bed. Sometimes he was afraid to fall asleep. All the things that kept her awake at night left him afraid to close his eye, and yet she hadn't even spoke of the worst. 

During one of her sleepless nights, Chanyeol laid awake with her, tracing the phases of the moon that Rosie had drawn small and delicate down her rib case, a small line down her side. 

"Why moons?" He lifted his eyes from the work on her body, his soft voice. Her own watching his fingers against goosebump decorated skin. 

Her breath hitched as his fingers rose higher along the line of her ribs, no longer tracing the tattoo, "You can't trust the moon, she's always changing. Yet she begs to be loved."

It was a warning. He wasn't a dumb man. 

Just like the moons on her side, Rosie would go through phases. And he would be next to her with every high and low. Depression was a hell of a battle but it wasn't war. Rosie wasn't courageous for living in the darkness, her words exactly. She was human, but life wasn't meant to be this way. Chanyeol often got lost in his anger about how a woman like her had to live with such overtaking voices when he saw what he saw in her. How her smile alone could brighten up a room. But maybe thats why it was so dark for her. The light was being used for others. 

Then things got almost too close to perfect. That pool of sadness in her sweet eyes had begun to dry up, there were less sleepless nights. If there were, it wasn't because of her mind. It was because of him and his greedy hands, greedy hands that she always ended up begging for more from. 

The early morning before it all shattered is when he should have known that her, the moon, would cause all the shores to bend and break. 

Rosie always teased him about never being able to just do nothing. With the glance at the time, her eyes light up as she plopped herself close to the edge of her bed, saying that it was time he learned how to do nothing. With no thoughts. No real feelings. Just simply nothing. 

That early morning is when Rosie taught him how to watch trains go by her bedroom window. 

And the next she was gone. 

—————————

Numb, that's how he felt. 

Rosie refused to answer his calls, he eventually filled up her mail voicemail box. She left with a note, a fucking note asking him not to hate her but that was it. There was no explanation, and that might have been the worst part. He should have stayed at her apartment until she came back, but Chanyeol tried to find her that morning. Going to their normal spots, her normal spots, even going as far as tracking down friend of hers, leading him to a dead end. When he tried her apartment again, Rosie didn't answer the constant buzzing. 

Chanyeol didn't know how it was possible to feel such pain without a wound punched in the middle of his chest. He was intact technically, but he sure as hell didn't feel like it. After a week of silence, lines of text messages and no calls back, it was clear he was no longer wanted. For a girl who hated that feeling, she was awfully good at making him feel that way. It was hard not to fee bitter, ripped apart, broken. He just never thought her small hands were capable of such carnage. 

He tried to combat it by doing everything he could. Friends, basketball, picking up more clients for lessons, submerging himself into work to be able to forget about the last 6 months of his life like they never exist. 

But with her, that was impossible.

The basketball in his hands gracefully left his palms, taking a shot at the chain basket from the line. His small group of friends whooped and hollered as it sank in for a point. It was the weekly Monday night scrimmage his friend, Sehun had put together. Just something for him to use as an eraser , but just like the tattoos on her skin that he had traced so many time with the pads of his fingers, Rosie would never be erased. 

He wiped the sweat dripping from the sides of his face, New York heat had already started but that wasn't going to be the reason for his long summer. Chanyeol used to tell his own heartbroken friends that it would get better, now he was the one to ask himself when that would be. It had already been two months, with no signs of the ache leaving him. 

Chanyeol listened as his basketball buddies joked around, packing their sweaty towels and emptied water bottles into their bags. Johnny was giving Jongin shit for bowing out of game night at the bar-- the Knicks were playing-- for a new girl he was dating, some cat-eyed vixen is how Jongin explained her. Lucas joined in, whipping the newly smitten man with a towel. He gulped down his feelings and flashes of her in his mind, sitting down onto the bench and catching his breath while packing his own stuff away.

"You good, man?" Sehun hesitated from beside him. 

He cleared his throat, "Dandy. Same place as always tonight, right? McMullen's?" Chanyeol zipped up his bag and slung it over his shoulder as he stood, glancing to Sehun for confirmation.

Sehun could see right through him, but nodded. "Meet at the subway station on 2nd and E 13th?" 

"I'll just meet you all at the bar." No trains, no subways. Not without her.

He understood what Sehun was trying to do, help him and push him along. He had been the only one who really knew what had happened with Rosie. It all came out one night when Chanyeol broke down, the night her voicemail box filled up. It wasn't that he had kept Rosie a secret, his friend's had met her once or twice, but Chanyeol hadn't disclosed anything more. 

There were times that his life felt like how it was before her. It came randomly, sometimes while he played guitar on his small porch or nights like tonight where the beer was flowing and peanut shells scattered on the bar floor. They were never very long, a short moment where she didn't exist but tonights lasted longer, longer than it ever had. For that moment he could breathe, the ache didn't pit in his stomach, his fingertips beginning to forget the feeling of her smooth skin. He yelled along with the rest of the fan that crowded the bar, feeling himself smile genuinely and even laughing. A real laugh, not a fake or forced one that had become his norm for the last couple months. 

Taking a quick bathroom break, Chanyeol took a peak at himself in the mirror. Either the bomber jacket he was wearing was too big or he had lost a little weight. His eyes looks tired, not with bags underneath them but deep inside his irises. He was tired. Tired of not having her around anymore, tried of feeling the pain of it all. But he was more tired of not feeling like him anymore. It may have been a beer hazed mind, but he huffed in slight determination and made a promise to himself. It was time for him to rip himself from the memory of them and move on. 

But then his phone rang, vibrating his jacket with each alert. 

"Rosie?"

"Hi." He closed his eyes hearing her voice again, it had felt like a lifetime. His throat fell dry, making it hard for him to respond back. "Do you have a second?" 

Chanyeol swallowed harshly. He had more than seconds for her. He had minutes, hours, days, lifetimes willing to give. All for her. "Is everything okay?" 

It suddenly worried him that she was calling at such a late hour, nevertheless calling him. But he couldn't help how his heart barely lifted with the smallest bit of hope that maybe she wanted to talk. 

"Yeah I just," Rosie trailed off, she sounded just as sad as he felt. "I know you have been trying to reach me. I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to call back—"

"I miss you."

The phone line hummed.

"The money that you loaned me a while ago for rent, I can finally pay you back." She replied after a silent moment, her voice was begging not to crack. His own emotions storming in his chest. 

"Fuck, I don't care about the money Rosie." He spat out of anger and devastation that she had left him in. That she had caused. He heard her exhale a sharp breath at his tone. "Come back to me." He broke, his low voice deep with earning. "Please. Whatever it is, I'll fix it."

"It's not yours to fix." Rosie trembled, her voice stuttering. Something she did when she was upset, trying with all her might not to break. "You were everything, Chanyeol." 

"But not enough." 

He heard a small choke, a sob. 

"Even enough is not enough. Nothing is enough. Everything isn't enough But how was I supposed to hold such a perfect thing and not demolish it? That's all I ever do. It was perfect, you were perfect. And I couldn't ruin you." Her voice was so small, broken but still powerful enough to leave every part of him in shards. Shards of his broken self. "I know you don't understand."

"No, I don't." His fist clenched against the wall, taking everything within him not to slam it into the pathetic drywall of the bar bathroom. How could she talk about preserving him when her leaving was the only thing to ever crumble him into the finest dust. 

Her voice was nauseating him, but not from hate. From how much he couldn't hate her. 

"Chanyeol—" 

He hung up before any more could be said, his mind blacking out. His breathing was erratic, along with his heart that he didn't even know was still beating. Never in his life had he felt something lost, and now his first felt like the end of him. He cursed at her for being selfish but then he cursed at himself for even thinking that way. He wasn't the only one suffering in this, but she had been suffering longer. For her entire life. That's where they were different. He thought it was worse to suffer alone when she would do anything to suffer alone. 

This was the type of love that would ruin the rest for him. How foolish of him to think he might actually be able to get over her. 

There was nothing he could do to change her mind. Like Rosie had said, it wasn't his to fix or change. She had always been stubborn when her decision had been made, her just never thought that decision would be to be without him. 

Chanyeol found himself at the only place he could make sense of, the train spot in Brooklyn. The morning rush hadn't started, 3am being too early for the rush of bodies. His world had been her, filled with her laugh and his guitar, her art and the smell of paint and Polaroids, lavender and vanilla. It was all too loud now, screaming inside his mind.

With his eyes on the apartment building just over the bridge and across the street, the sound of the first train rumbled, chilling his skin to the temperature of the air. The familiar clacks in twos were next, getting louder but silencing everything else. The sound never failed to align exactly with the beating in his chest. It was torture to do this to himself, but everything else seemed worse. She was scattered across this city. 

He had wanted it all, everything. But now, he wanted nothing.

It was the only thing he had to thank her for, for teaching him how. 

How to do nothing.


End file.
